


until we crumble to dust

by forcynics



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, another thing i wrote years ago and never posted, doing some clean-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 04:16:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6141191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forcynics/pseuds/forcynics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Salvatores kill Rebekah. Klaus burns Mystic Falls to the ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	until we crumble to dust

**Author's Note:**

> (i wrote this for someone near the end of s3 i'm pretty sure, before there was the originals spin off, but i never posted it on my own livejournal at the time, or on ao3 when i moved stuff over, so, lo and behold)

 

 

 

They aren’t supposed to have a weapon.

The Salvatore brothers and the dopplegangr girl caught in the crossfires of it all – they are absolutely nothing, at the end of the day when Klaus has lived a thousand years and they are merely the newest disturbance. Like flies.

Klaus and his siblings are supposed to be invincible. Rebekah is invincible, until it happens, and Klaus doesn’t see her burn with his own eyes but he feels it, the sharp pain that tears through him and bursts in his chest, sudden and overwhelming and hot like flames. He sees white behind his eyelids when he squeezes them shut; he sees gold, he sees Rebekah, and he thinks _Esther’s children are linked in blood_ , and that is when he knows. When he feels her death inside his own chest, in his bones and his blood and his body.

He is moving before he can open his eyes, running faster than any living creature, pulled towards the spot where his sister last stood. If he runs—

He gets there faster than they can get away. There is Damon and there is Stefan, the betrayer with oak in his hand, and Klaus smashes into him, hardly registers that he has already shoved his fist inside Stefan’s chest and curled his fingers around his heart by the time Stefan slams into the wall. He does meet Stefan’s eyes, for the briefest moment, before he yanks his heart out and throws it on the ground.

He hears a scream – the dopplegangr – but she is gone, and Damon is gone, and Klaus stands over his sister’s corpse and does not breathe. One thousand years, and these vampires were inconsequential, so how is it that Rebekah is burnt up in flames and it was all for nothing.

 

 

 

 

Klaus paints a ring around the Mystic Grill in kerosene.

Both entrances are locked, the doors warped out of shape where he jammed them further into place. Inside, people laugh and drink and plan out parties, and Rebekah is dead and they will burn for it. He lights the match, and he drops it, and he watches.

The screams set in quickly, as they realize. They smash windows, and more flames lick their way inside. Caroline Forbes appears at one opening, barely visible through the smoke, but he sees her blond hair, radiant in the glow. She screams too, a poor golden child, and he sees Rebekah.

He watches her die, watches her burst into incandescent flame, and he exhales.

 

 

 

 

The flames spread, and he lets them. He sets more fires throughout the town – at the mayor’s house, at the school, at the library, at the church. He watches as buildings creak and crumble, and he listens to the screams. He sets fires all around the town, lets them eat their way towards the centre and consume everything in between. He doesn’t know where the dopplegangr is, if she’s miles away already or caught in his inferno.

He doesn’t need hybrids anymore. He doesn’t need an army. His entire existence has been spent with Rebekah at his side, or on his mind. They ran from their father, they feared the weapon he’d created, and they feared death at his hands. Never this. He watches the town burn, and he is pitiful. He is lost and he is nothing.

He watches it burn until only ash and wreckage remains.

Then he does sort through the bodies, looks for her anyway, and laughs when he finds her, on the edge of the Salvatore property, a few feet away from Damon’s corpse. Elena Gilbert’s face is burnt almost beyond recognition, the last of the dopplegangrs; the world is finally rid of _that face._

Maybe he behaved hastily, to let her perish with all of them, but he doesn’t have anything and he is nothing, so nothing matters beyond this, beyond a revenge which fuels him and leaves a rotten taste on his teeth and in his stomach and in every memory of his golden-haired sister, a thousand years that pushes on him every time he closes his eyes.

 

 

 

 

Mystic Falls is razed to the ground, and he walks through the remains, crushing charcoal under the toe of his boot, smearing it into the ground.

He wanders through ash and soot, through smoke that curls itself around him, fits into his skin and lingers, until he comes to the centre of the carnage. Once, there stood a building here, once, there was a road, and once, long before all of that, there stood a village, and it was here he called home. Once, they were humans here, Rebekah and he.

He should have drawn this out, should have made them scream and wrecked them slowly, should have should have should have. He was a patient man, biding his time for a thousand years, but that was with Rebekah, and now she is gone, and it’s like his stitches come undone, like a strange emptiness every time he curls his fingers closed, always grasping.

They were children on this ground once, children before they were monsters, before they were dead. They played in the dirt and in the stream, and the sun shone on Rebekah’s golden hair, so soft under his fingers.

They burned an oak on this ground, but then there was another, and their precautions weren’t enough in the end (an end a thousand years later, and maybe that’s why it doesn’t count, maybe they got more than a lifetime after all). Oak killed Rebekah, and Salvatores killed Rebekah, and this whole town killed Rebekah, and Klaus walks on their ashes – this is what a thousand years of history has been reduced to.

They made a promise on this ground, _always and forever,_ with hands held so tight she’d dug her nails into his palm, and he’d shivered and tried to imagine _forever_ and could only see her.

Klaus stands on the remnants of that promise, burnt and torn to pieces. _Rebekah, Rebekah_ , he thinks, and he clings to it, clings to what remains, clings to her— _always and forever_ , and it is the worst lie.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
